Earvin "Magic" Johnson was diagnosed with HIV 20 years ago. As hard as it would have been to believe in 1991 -- when the virus was thought to have a short fuse that blew up quickly into a fatal case of full-blown AIDS -- Johnson, the NBA's most dazzling assists man, is still alive.

Photo provided by Amelia ConradTulane University junior Amelia Conrad, left, president of the campus chapter of RESULTS, poses with Joyce Kamwana, a speaker on campus for World AIDS day. RESULTS is a national public policy advocacy group. Kamwana was diagnosed with HIV in her home country, Malawi, in 1988.

Not only that, but he looks healthy, in the way grandmamas and aunties use that word to describe somebody well acquainted with the dinner table.

Joyce Kamwana found out she was HIV positive three years before Johnson did. Unlike the superstar millionaire athlete, Kamwana, who is from Malawi in east Africa and was then the married mother of two daughters, did not have access to the best treatment. For 15 years, she says, she didn't have access to treatment at all. Yet, when I sat with her in The Times-Picayune cafeteria a week ago, Kamwana looked healthy, too.

Before treatment, she said, she weighed 117 pounds. After she began taking anti-retrovirals in 2003, she developed the kind of concern that people on Twitter have categorized as a "first world problem." Kamwana fretted that she was "getting too heavy."

Kamwana, 48, spoke at Tulane on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day. She spoke about her own survival and the progress that her country has been making in its fight against AIDS. At the height of the scourge, AIDS was killing 10 Malawians an hour. Thanks in part to funding by the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the AIDS mortality rate has now been reduced to one person an hour. That's still depressingly high, but, at the same time, reason to be optimistic.

With Magic Johnson looking so hale and hearty it might be difficult for many Americans to stay alarmed about the transmission of HIV, but as President Barack Obama said in a World AIDS address last week, "When new infections among young black gay men increase by nearly 50 percent in three years, we need to do more to show them their lives matter. When Latinos are dying sooner than other groups, and when black women feel forgotten, even though they account for most of the new cases among women, then we've got to do more."

The president began his World AIDS Day speech appropriately, by praising President George W. Bush's "bold leadership on this issue." Obama said, "I believe that history will record the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS relief as one of his greatest legacies."

Bush did indeed do remarkable work in the global fight against AIDS. An April 2009 Washington Post editorial points out that PEPFAR, the initiative that Obama praised, was responsible for 240,000 babies in sub-Saharan Africa entering the world HIV-free. They were born without the virus after their mothers got anti-retroviral treatment during their pregnancies. Between 2003 and 2008, PEPFAR spent $18.8 billion and reportedly delayed or prevented 1.2 million deaths.

The Obama administration is trying to advance that fight even further. His office increased support for the Global Fund, he said during his address, and his administration hopes to increase the number of people getting U.S. provided anti-retroviral treatment from 4 million worldwide to 6 million by the end of 2013.

He asked Congress to keep funding life-saving initiatives. He said, "the fight against this disease has united us across parties and across presidents. And it shows that we can do big things when Republicans and Democrats put their common humanity before politics."

Let us pray humanity wins out. AIDS has killed 25 million people in 30 years, and 33.4 million are believed to be living with either HIV or AIDS today. Even so, there are those who argue against the United States waging this global fight.

Maybe they'd be as opposed after sitting with Kamwana, but they'd have to be particularly heartless to avoid rooting for her. Her resilience is inspiring. So is her smile.

"They feel it's the end of the world," she said of most people diagnosed with HIV. "I had to stay alive for my children. I had to be there for the girls.

"Having HIV doesn't make me less human," she said. "I'm still the same Joyce I was."